100 books like Taj Mahal

It really is ‘complete’ as it claims: this is the most thorough and authoritative account of the design and construction of India’s most famous building. Underpinned by robust scholarship, the story is engagingly told and wonderfully illustrated with many photographs and diagrams. The author visually reconstructs the larger (now lost) series of riverside gardens in Agra, and explains how the Taj Mahal fitted into this unique built environment. 

Published to coincide with an exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art back in 1989, this book still offers one of the best introductions to the cultural world of the Taj Mahal. Written by the curators at LACMA, the various chapters place the design of the tomb in the wider context of the decorative arts of Mughal India and show how it has also inspired later artists around the world. 

This slim but well illustrated book gives an account of archaeological excavations that the author and others carried out in the mid-1990s. They unearthed the large but previously lost garden called the Mehtab Bagh on the far bank of the River Yamuna, facing the Taj Mahal. In so doing they debunked the long-standing myth about Shah Jahan’s plans to build a black replica Taj on that spot and showed instead what the real original garden scheme was like. Fascinatingly told, the story fully lives up to the claim to reveal ‘new discoveries’. 

This is a survey of all Mughal architecture, in which only a few pages are devoted to the Taj Mahal directly, but for anyone who wants to understand the Taj not as something unique and inexplicable, but as a logical part of a longer tradition of design, this book is essential reading. While there are other surveys of Mughal architecture on offer, a major strength of this one is the author’s inclusion of many minor and provincial buildings that provide a wider context for the famous stand-out masterpieces like the Taj. 

I love experiments in the novel form, and this book by the Czech Ourednik startled me from the first words of its opening, a deadpan sentence telling us that the Americans who died at Normandy in 1944 were unusually tall. What follows is an accounting of important and trivial happenings of a hundred years of war-riddled world history in roughly the same number of pages.

Throughout, we read random details, skipping from how often people bathed to psychologists’ recommendations about venting aggression through competitive sports to the changes in human lives occasioned by contraceptives and tear-off toilet paper. Every page is always the tongue-in-cheek narration of absurdities I couldn’t help reading aloud to whoever was nearby. No book is like this one, and maybe no other so profound.

Yuri Slezkine’s classic book on the history of Russian Jewry is not a work of migration history strictly speaking. But there is no Jewish history without migration, and Slezkine shows us, among many other things, how Russian Jews ended up in the US, Israel, and the Soviet Union, representing three ideological choices—liberalism, nationalism, and communism.

I read this book back in university, and few works, if any, have had such a profound impact on my historical thinking.

Despite the Covid pandemic, the two biggest threats to human society are political strife and degradation of its food supply through climate change and population explosion. Darren Qualman provides an easily understood discussion of the latter. He starts with the simple closed-loop plant/animal cycle powered by the sun’s energy, which existed up until about 300 years ago. Then, explains how the discovery of coal and oil, invention of the tractor, and development of a process to convert oil into fertilizer changed all that.

As a teenager, I was taught that the population explosion would cause mass starvation in the near future. Darren explains how force-feeding plants and domesticated animals, now using over 400 million tons of oil-based fertilizer each year, forestalled that. But combined with oil, gas, and coal burned today, human society is living with a time-bomb unless we learn to live with energy now available from the sun.

In this book, Pankaj Mishraj describes how the failures of secular modernity led to the rise of revanchist movements seeking to provide those left behind with a common sense of purpose.

I greatly appreciated the international scope of Mishraj’s analysis, with which he reveals how the growth of reactionary, theocratic, and xenophobic populist politics across the globe are manifestations of the same sense of malaise.

He convincingly argues that these tensions are as old as modernity itself. Rather than engaging strictly with the same old historical and sociological sources to make his case, the author refreshingly engages the poets and novelists of the era he describes.

I have always doubted the claim that people are predominantly violent and egotistical and can never change. Jeremy Rifkin, in this well-researched book, shows that despite humanity’s history of conflicts and misery, human beings have the potential, and have already begun, to create an empathic, global society.

A book such as this is needed to help us understand history as a process of humanity’s gradual maturing.

Maté asks why chronic illness and general poor health are on the rise in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems.

Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, one person in five has high blood pressure, while in Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And adolescent mental illness is on the rise everywhere.

Despite medical knowledge and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person by not considering how contemporary culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines our sense of emotional balance.

Maté dispels common myths about what makes us sick, connecting the dots between the maladies of individuals and the progressive malaise of society, and offers some suggestions for healing.